PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island — Plates slam in the dark David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. In Listening takes, a three-channel installation by filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin, French actress Manal Issa sits in a brasserie, recreating a 1983 interview with the late actress Maria Schneider. Every pause, flinch and puff is the same, including the painful reaction to a question about Last Tango in Paristhe movie that inflicted a surprise rape scene on Schneider when she was 19.
When Issa is finished, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval each reproduce this interview on their own screens, modifying the script slightly to take into account their experiences as black women and trans women, respectively. Through this repetitive reinterpretation, Subrin compels viewers to see how cavalierly the aggression is addressed – “Can you not separate your experience from the strength of the film? asks the interviewer – and how the desire of the media, and by extension the public, to indulge in the details of the event perpetuates more subtle violence.
The layout of the installation entangles visitors in the conflict. Each screen is housed in a wooden return backed by a mirror. The interweaving of our own musings with the close shots of each performer creates a sickening sense of voyeurism, an effect heightened by the intricate soundscape, in which angled speakers situate each Maria in conversation with the others.
Throughout her career, Subrin has expressed a longstanding concern with how actresses serve as archetypes for how women move through the world; conveying both desires and fears, they simulate circumstances through which the audience can project fantasies or safely confront or heal from personal experiences. In Listening takes, we observe the relationship between the observed and the observer in real time; while one Maria is talking, the others seem to be listening, and when Sandoval concludes, they all start over together. Viewers keeping an eye on Sandoval throughout this final loop will be rewarded. The most modern iteration, it’s blessed with the agency we wish Schneider had in 1983. Condemning the scene for what it was – a rape – she leaves the set with a life made lighter by that admission.
After the spectacle in the space behind the Sandoval screen until the last mirrors, we only see ourselves. From the loudspeakers higher up the hall, the real Maria Schneider speaks, untied and blissful, in a spliced dialogue by Michelangelo Antonioni The passengerthe film, as we learned from the series, she felt most represented.
“People disappear every day,” she tells the other Marias, and us. “I hope you get there.”
Elisabeth Subrin: Listening takes continues at the David Winton Bell Gallery (List Art Building Brown University, 64 College Street, Providence, Rhode Island) through June 4. The exhibition was curated by Kate Kraczon, Exhibitions Director and Chief Curator of the gallery.
